Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has ruffled feathers by sharing an unexplained photo of himself clutching a bird.
RFK Jr. has a history of extreme animal encounters, including revealing in his own diaries that he once pulled his car over and cut the penis off a dead raccoon, which he planned to study at a later date.
The 72-year-old posted a photo on his X account on Sunday of himself grasping a bird with the caption, “Starling rescue today at Dulles Airport.” It had more than 2 million views at the time of publication.
He made no further explanation of where the bird came from, what he was doing holding it, or what he did with it. Kennedy is a bird lover or a “birder,” who even trains falcons and ravens.
European starlings are common in the Dulles area of Virginia, with nearly 600 sightings by birdwatchers at the airport, including near the airport ponds.
Starlings are considered an invasive species. They are known to travel in large, noisy flocks and can cause a significant hazard to aviation.
After his brief post, social media users were quick to weigh in on RFK Jr. and his feathered friend. Kennedy’s post eventually trended on X, with the social platform noting users pointed to Kennedy’s infamous incident with a bear.
In 2014, he witnessed a woman hit a bear while driving upstate. He put the corpse in his van and after realizing he could not transport the dead animal home in time to make a flight, he abandoned it in New York City’s Central Park.
Journalist and internet personality Yashar Ali summed up many concerns for the bird online, posting on Threads, “I’m scared… what is he going to do with it."
“Is the bird OK...,” another user questioned on Instagram.
“I don’t want to know what happened after,” MeidasTouch editor-in-chief Ron Filipkowski posted on X.
Others pointed out the bird was European and, tapping into the Trump administration’s mission, posted that it “needs to be deported.”
The Daily Beast has contacted reps for the health secretary and Dulles Airport for comment.
It is merely the latest in a string of confounding incidents related to the animal kingdom in Kennedy’s history.
He has kept and trained falcons and ravens on his property, posting a 2024 Instagram video of ravens he was feeding. He previously said the ravens “join me for meditations every morning on my balcony.”
The Republican also once owned an aggressive emu that would charge at his wife, Cheryl Hines. She told The New York Times in 2024, “Is today going to be the day that I wake up and kill an emu in my backyard?” The emu, named Toby, was later killed by a mountain lion.
His cousin, Caroline Kennedy, claimed in a letter to lawmakers last year that while he was in college, Kennedy would blend chicks and mice to feed his hawks, calling his dorm room “a perverse scene of despair and violence.”
While he was an environmental attorney in 2000, Kennedy Jr. became embroiled in a fight when he attempted to hire a scientist who had just been released from prison for running an international wildlife-smuggling ring that harmed rare bird populations.
His daughter Kick revealed her father had carried the head of a whale carcass home in the 1990s, after it had washed up on a beach. “Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” she told Town & Country in 2012.
Around 2010, he claimed a worm crawled into his brain, ate part of it, and then died, blaming it for his memory loss.
